LM Studio is pretty easy to setup and then download new models (for a self-hosted option), but sifting through all the models can take time. LM Studio helps bc it can tell you which should run ok on your machine. Uncensored models seem to do what they’re told better than others.

Any self hosted ai thing. I recommend llamacpp because it's the easiest to set up. Gpt4all is a ui solution that runs on top of llamacpp that would also be an excellent choice. All you have to do is download any gguf compatible model from hugging face, figure out what command line options you need for multithreaded operation and to load your custom model. If you want one that's actually loyal and is less likely to be pushing some agenda, make sure it says it's uncensored. Even if you're not doing porn or ai girlfriend stuff you still want it to be uncensored or else it will be as disloyal as chat gpt. Note that uncensored and nsfw are 2 different thing so if you actually want an ai girlfriend or a shitpost generator, it needs to be both uncensored and nsfw.

Same story with image generation ai. Use easy diffusion for self hosting and download whatever models you want, nsfw or otherwise from civitai.

Don't bother with online ai services, they are trash.

NovelAI is an amazing tool if you want to write stories. Cost: 10-25$ with a free trial, of course. In comparison to GPT-style LLMs, it has far less general knowledge, but it has immense training on online books and fanfiction. If you start writing a story, it will start emulating your style and producing great details with perfect grammar. And the best part? Born out of the dumpster fire of AI Dungeon, no censorship on anything. Full, unabridged NSFW, gore, suicide, war, torture. I've written a medieval war story turned isekai (with authentic battle damage) turned smut. Sadly, unless you wanna rip the leaked parameters floating around 4chan, you can't selfhost. You can store it locally and in a file or in your cookies, and it does have free remote storage too.

Ugh, I keep wanting to add more edits. It has great AI generation bundled in, with most people (notably Japanese) coming for that. All Danbooru trained. Yes, that means what you think it means.

There are caveats, though. You need to actually put in some effort for your first prompts and tweaking the configs. Thankfully, the UI is GORGEOUS. A quick ask on the Discord can give you the up-to-date best options anyway, and they're quite helpful. The AI needs some rather intensive editing, but that's the thing: It's as if NovelAI is the writer and you are the editor. And it's damn good at writing. Railroad onto plot point and it will shine like diamonds in one or two runs through the AI. And? If you get really into the nitty gritty with their actual fantastic documentation, you can do stuff like inject AO3 tags into your story to induce a particular mood, theme, tone, genre, style, etc. I legitimately am going to tell my future kids that I did AI the cool way.

Haven't been following lately, mistral was the best unrestricted model when I was on the scene a bit ago